How to Perform an IP Lookup

How to Perform an IP Lookup

October 13, 2024

Maxmind IP lookup, system administrators, and infosec professionals commonly use the ability to look up a user’s IP address and determine their location. It’s a popular tool for phishing detection, spamming, DNS attacks and other cybercrime investigation.

The most common method to perform an IP lookup is to use a 3rd party geolocation API service. These services vary in price, information returned and rate limits, but all require an account with the service provider. They also typically impose a monthly limit on the number of queries per IP address.

MaxMind IP Lookup: A Comprehensive Guide for IP Intelligence

Another method is to use a command line tool called mmdbctl, which can be used to create a customized MMDB file containing only the data that you want. MMDB files are binary and can’t be edited easily, but they’re incredibly fast at IP lookups. Once you’ve created a custom MMDB file, you can then import it into Snowplow Micro via an enrichment template.

In addition to determining the location of a user, these databases also return other useful details, such as connection type (e.g. proxy or VPN), the country of registration for the ISP or organization that owns the IP address, and the time zone of the region represented by the geolocation data. This is valuable information for marketers to have when analyzing web events, and can help them better understand the user experience from region to region and make more informed product decisions.

You can test out our GeoIP2 web services by using the tools in your account portal, or download a free version of the databases to experiment with them on your own. We’ve also built a tool that lets you compare the accuracy of these databases and web services at the city level for different countries, so you can select which service is right for your business.

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